Romain Grosjean says changes that Lotus made overnight to his car helped him secure fourth on the grid for the Japanese Grand Prix.

Lotus looked competitive on Friday over one lap but Grosjean was unhappy with the pace during race simulations. Having taken a gamble on making some changes, Grosjean said there was an immediate difference on Saturday morning and that the car was much more to his liking throughout qualifying.

"It's night and day compared to yesterday," Grosjean said. "We worked quite hard last night trying to analyse what was right, what was wrong and what we could do to adapt. The feeling was pretty clear; it wasn't that clear on the data but then we made the change, tried to go for it and the first lap this morning the car felt very, very different and very competitive.

"I was very surprised on the hards because yesterday we were something like two seconds off the pace and today we're probably one of the quickest. So I'm happy with that, it was close but not close enough."

Having qualified on the second row for the third consecutive race, Grosjean said he was happy to have split the Mercedes.

"I think we are pretty much where we expected to be honest. Before qualy we expect to be P5 or something like that but we did manage to beat one of the Mercedes so that's a good point. It's a track where lap-time is very close because there are not many corners where you can make a big difference, surprisingly, but there are a lot of corners where it's easy to make a mistake."

Following the Rugby Football Union's announcement on Sunday that England Sevens coach Ben Ryan is set to relinquish his role, various past, present and future England internationals have taken to Twitter to praise him